The 1950 movie year was one of the best ever. It provided many pleasures, not all of which were recognized by Oscar.

Oscar nominations, as expected, were dominated by the year’s two best films, both about the underbelly of show business.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which skewers the Broadway theater world, opens with an awards ceremony, the catalyst for various characters to look back at the start of the winning actress’s career only a year earlier with a jaundiced eye. Billy Wilder’s even more cynical Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator, a Hollywood writer turned gigolo, floating dead in the Beverly Hills pool of a faded silent screen star.

Setting a new record for nominations, All About Eve received fourteen, winning six including Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay and Supporting Actor, George Sanders as a vicious columnist. Among those it didn’t win were four other acting nods for Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter. Director/writer Mankiewicz became the first, and only to date, back to back winner in both categories.

Davis, whose career had been on the downturn for the last few years, re-emerged at the height of her prowess as a fading star who is undermined by her protégée, Baxter. Holm is her best friend and Ritter, the faithful maid who is the only one to see through Baxter’s façade at first meeting. Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlow co-star and Marilyn Monroe makes a brief but memorable appearance as an aspiring actress “from the Copacabana school of acting.”

We know at the start of Sunset Boulevard that William Holden’s character is dead, which firmly places it in film noir territory. We spend the rest of the film learning what led to his death in the mansion of demented once famous silent screen star Gloria Swanson whose butler Erich von Stroheim was once a famed Hollywood director.

Nominated for eleven Oscars including Best Direction, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress (Nancy Olson), the film won three for Story and Screenplay, Art Direction and Scoring. Swanson, who came out of retirement for the film, is a revelation and has some of the best lines ever given an actress including the immortal “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”

Davis and Swanson were the front-runners for Best Actress. Davis had won the New York Film Critics Award and Swanson the National Board of Review and Golden Globe, but Oscar went in a different direction, giving the award to newcomer Judy Holliday as the dumb blonde who outwits her gangster boss. Broderick Crawford and William Holden were her co-stars in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday, also nominated for Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay and Black-and-White Costume Design.

Vincente Minnelli’s much loved Father of the Bride was also in the race for Best Picture as well as Best Actor (Spencer Tracy) and Screenplay as was the remake of H. Rider Haggard’s African safari tale, King Solomon’s Mines,which won the other two Oscars it was nominated for, Best Editing and Color Cinematography.

Shockingly left out of the Best Picture race were two films whose directors had been nominated for Best Direction: The Third Man and The Asphalt Jungle.

Often cited as the best British film ever made, as well as one of the top 100 American films on the American Film Institute’s list, Carol Reed’s film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man is both. It was filmed in Austria with British financing, but tinkered with in Hollywood for American consumption. The American release version substitutes British co-star Trevor Howard’s narration for that of American Joseph Cotten who also stars with Orson Welles, Alida Valli and that ubiquitous zither music. It won an Oscar for its impressive Black-and-White Cinematography and was also nominated for its Editing.

John Huston’s heist classic, The Asphalt Jungle was nominated for four Oscars including Best Supporting Actor Sam Jaffe who stands out in a cast that also provides memorable roles for Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, James Whitmore, Jean Hagen and in another bit, Marilyn Monroe.

Nominated only for its witty screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib was easily the best of the nine films Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together. The classic tale of married attorneys on opposing sides of a case also provided strong supporting roles for Judy Holliday, David Wayne, Jean Hagen, Tom Ewell and Hope Emerson.

Completely overlooked by Oscar, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, perhaps the best of Britain’s Ealing Studio comedies, was recognized by the National Board of Review which gave its best actor award to Alec Guinness playing nine characters who are systematically murdered by Dennis Price.

Another comedy of note, Henry Koster’s film of Mary Chase’s Harvey provided Best Actor nominee James Stewart with one of his most endearing roles as the soft-spoken alcoholic whose best friend is an invisible six foot tall rabbit. Josephine Hull won the Supporting Actress Oscar as his exasperated sister.

Stewart also had memorable roles this year in Broken Arrow and Winchester ‘73.

Nominated for three Oscars, Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrowwas one of the first westerns to deal sympathetically with the American Indian as emphasized by Best Supporting Actor nominee Jeff Chandler’s portrayal of Cochise.

 The first of seven Stewart films, six of them westerns, directed by Anthony Mann, Winchester ’73 is also renown for being the first film for which its star negotiated a share of the profits in exchange for a lower than usual salary. It made Stewart one of the richest actors in Hollywood.

Several other westerns including Annie Get Your Gun, Rio Grande, Stars in My Crown, Devil’s Doorway, The Gunfighter and The Furies made 1950 one of the most profitable years in the genre.

Nominated for four Oscars and winner of one for Scoring of a Musical, George Sidney’s film of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun is sadly most famous for the firing of Judy Garland in the starring role of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. I say sadly because that emphasis underscores the marvelous performance of Betty Hutton who was justly nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar. Hutton may not have been as forceful a singer as Garland but she sings quite nicely all the same, thank you, and her natural spontaneity is perfect for the role. Howard Keel is also terrific as her co-star and Louis Calhern makes a delightful Buffalo Bill, substituting for Frank Morgan who died during filming.

The third film in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Rio Grandeis notable for providing Maureen O’Hara a role that is even stronger than John Wayne’s as the two fight for the soul of their 17 year-old son, played by Claude Jarman, Jr. The Writers’ Guild nominated its screenplay, but Oscar unfairly ignored it.

In one of his best roles, Joel McCrea plays a country preacher in the days just after the Civil War in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown, a still under-rated gem with an outstanding supporting performance by Dean Stockwell, one of the era’s best child actors.

Robert Taylor also had one of his best roles as a decorated American Indian returning to his roots after the Civil War in Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway, a Writers’ Guild nominee that like Rio Grandeand Stars in My Crown was unfairly overlooked by the Academy.

Nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, Henry King’s The Gunfighter provided Gregory Peck with one of his best roles as well, as a notorious gunman who can’t shake his reputation.

Anthony Mann’s third western this year was the bizarre Barbara Stanwyck-Walter Huston starrer The Furies which was nominated for Best Black-and-White Cinematography. Judith Anderson co-stars as a once beautiful woman who is disfigured by stepdaughter Stanwyck.

Adventure films were represented by Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epic, Samson and Deliah with Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, nominated for five Oscars and winner of two for its Color Art Direction and Costume Design; Jacques Tourneur’s Robin Hood light The Flame and the Arrow with Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo, nominated for its Score and Color Cinematography; Disney’s remake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton as Long John Silver and Victor Saville’s film of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim with Errol Flynn and Dean Stockwell in the title role.

One of the first, and still the best, of the female prison films, John Cromwell’s Caged was the most nominated of the year’s social issues dramas. It was nominated for three including Best Actress Eleanor Parker as an innocent woman who hardens under the system and Hope Emerson as the harsh prison matron as well as Best Story and Screenplay.

Social issues were also explored in some of the year’s best films including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets with Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas about the search for a killer infected with the pneumonic plague, an Oscar winner for Best Motion Picture Story; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out with Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell and Sidney Poitier about racial bigotry in a hospital, an Oscar nominee for Story and Screenplay; Mark Robson’s Edge of Doom with Dana Andrews and Farley Granger about the murder of a priest and Fred Zinnemann’s The Men with Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright about a paraplegic World War II veteran, nominated for Story and Screenplay.

Not an awards getter in its day but revered now as one of the best films noir ever, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place provided Humphrey Bogart with one of his best roles as a Hollywood screenwriter who may or may not be a murderer and Gloria Grahame has never been better than as the B actress who comes to love him.

Louis Calhern and Jose Ferrer recreated their respective stage roles in The Magnificent Yankee and Cyrano de Bergerac, winning Oscar nominations for their efforts, the latter winning the category.

Although both films betray their stage origins, both are more than worth seeing. Calhern plays Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ann Harding his beloved wife in The Magnificent Yankee, which was also nominated for Best Black-and-White Costume Design. Ferrer may be the whole show in Cyrano de Bergerac whose popularity has long since been eclipsed by the 1990 French remake with Gerard Depardieu, but his magnificent performance more than makes up for any of the film’s shortcomings.

All films mentioned except Stars in My Crown, Edge of Doom and Samson and Delilah have been released on DVD in the U.S., although the latter is available on an import that will play on U.S. machines.

I can’t really recommend any new DVD releases this week as there aren’t any I’ve seen, but if you’re interested, new releases include Date Night and The Jonses.